Understanding Child Feeding Practices of Vietnamese Mothers

Purpose: To understand the feeding practices, knowledge, and nutritional beliefs of Vietnamese mothers with young children who are recent immigrants to the United States

Performance Characteristics of Indigenous Turkeys Fed Indomie Waste Based Diets

. This study evaluated the performance of Turkey poults fed indomie waste based diet. A total of ninety six (96) local strain Turkey poults were allotted to four dietary treatment in which indomie waste was used to replace maize at 0, 33.33, 66.67 and 100% levels, representing one to four treatments respectively. Each treatment was replicated three times with eight poults per replicate. The study which lasted for eight weeks was a completely randomized design experiment. Results showed that indomie waste significantly increased the average weight gain and improved feed conversion ratio. The cost of feed per kg decreased with increasing levels of indomie waste in the diet. The lowest cost was obtained at 66.67% inclusion level. It was evident that indomie waste could be incorporated into the diet of local strain Turkey poults up to 66.67% level without any deleterious effect on the performance of the Turkeys. There is also a concomitant reduction in feed cost per kg weight gain

Risk Behaviors of Dominican Adolescents in Their Homeland and in the United States

The purpose of this study was to compare self-reported high risk behaviors that may lead to unintentional and intentional injuries among adolescents living in the Dominican Republic and Dominican adolescents living in the United States

Casimir forces from a loop integral formulation

We reformulate the Casimir force in the presence of a non-trivial background. The force may be written in terms of loop variables, the loop being a curve around the scattering sites. A natural path ordering of exponentials take place when a particular representation of the scattering centres is given. The basic object to be evaluated is a reduced (or abbreviated) classical pseudo-action that can be operator valued.Comment: references added, text clarified in place

Space-time dependent couplings in N=1 SUSY gauge theories: Anomalies and Central Functions

We consider N=1 supersymmetric gauge theories in which the couplings are allowed to be space-time dependent functions. Both the gauge and the superpotential couplings become chiral superfields. As has recently been shown, a new topological anomaly appears in models with space-time dependent gauge coupling. Here we show how this anomaly may be used to derive the NSVZ beta function in a particular, well-determined renormalisation scheme, both without and with chiral matter. Moreover we extend the topological anomaly analysis to theories coupled to a classical curved superspace background, and use it to derive an all-order expression for the central charge c, the coefficient of the Weyl tensor squared contribution to the conformal anomaly. We also comment on the implications of our results for the central charge a expected to be of relevance for a four-dimensional C-theorem.Comment: 28 pages, LaTeX, no figure

Integrable Open Spin Chains in Defect Conformal Field Theory

We demonstrate that the one-loop dilatation generator for the scalar sector of a certain perturbation of N=4 Super Yang-Mills with fundamentals is the Hamiltonian of an integrable spin chain with open boundary conditions. The theory is a supersymmetric defect conformal field theory (dCFT) with the fundamentals in hypermultiplets confined to a codimension one defect. We obtain a K-matrix satisfying a suitably generalized form of the boundary Yang-Baxter equation, study the Bethe ansatz equations and demonstrate how Dirichlet and Neumann boundary conditions arise in field theory, and match to existing results in the plane wave limit.Comment: 26 pages, LaTeX. v2: references added, typos correcte

Mesons from global Anti-de Sitter space

In the context of gauge/gravity duality, we study both probe D7-- and probe D5--branes in global Anti-de Sitter space. The dual field theory is N=4 theory on R x S^3 with added flavour. The branes undergo a geometrical phase transition in this geometry as function of the bare quark mass m_q in units of 1/R with R the S^3 radius. The meson spectra are obtained from fluctuations of the brane probes. First, we study them numerically for finite quark mass through the phase transition. Moreover, at zero quark mass we calculate the meson spectra analytically both in supergravity and in free field theory on R x S^3 and find that the results match: For the chiral primaries, the lowest level is given by the zero point energy or by the scaling dimension of the operator corresponding to the fluctuations, respectively. The higher levels are equidistant. Similar results apply to the descendents. Our results confirm the physical interpretation that the mesons cannot pair-produce any further when their zero-point energy exceeds their binding energy.Comment: 43 pages, 8 figures, references edited, few typos corrected, updated to match the published versio

Supersymmetric probes on the conifold

We study the supersymmetric embeddings of different D-brane probes in the AdS_5 x T^{1,1} geometry. The main tool employed is kappa symmetry and the cases studied include D3-, D5- and D7-branes. We find a family of three-cycles of the T^{1,1} space over which a D3-brane can be wrapped supersymmetrically and we determine the field content of the corresponding gauge theory duals. Supersymmetric configurations of D5-branes wrapping a two-cycle and of spacetime filling D7-branes are also found. The configurations in which the entire T^{1,1} space is wrapped by a D5-brane (baryon vertex) and a D7-brane are also studied. Some other embeddings which break supersymmetry but are nevertheless stable are also determined.Comment: 44 pages, LaTeX; v2: typos corrected, references added, discussion of D5-brane embeddings improve

Dynamics of Fundamental Matter in N=2* Yang-Mills Theory

We study the dynamics of quenched fundamental matter in $\mathcal{N}=2^\ast$ supersymmetric large $N$ SU(N) Yang-Mills theory at zero temperature. Our tools for this study are probe D7-branes in the holographically dual $\mathcal{N}=2^\ast$ Pilch-Warner gravitational background. Previous work using D3-brane probes of this geometry has shown that it captures the physics of a special slice of the Coulomb branch moduli space of the gauge theory, where the $N$ constituent D3-branes form a dense one dimensional locus known as the enhancon, located deep in the infrared. Our present work shows how this physics is supplemented by the physics of dynamical flavours, revealed by the D7-branes embeddings we find. The Pilch-Warner background introduces new divergences into the D7-branes free energy, which we are able to remove with a single counterterm. We find a family of D7-brane embeddings in the geometry and discuss their properties. We study the physics of the quark condensate, constituent quark mass, and part of the meson spectrum. Notably, there is a special zero mass embedding that ends on the enhancon, which shows that while the geometry acts repulsively on the D7-branes, it does not do so in a way that produces spontaneous chiral symmetry breaking.Comment: 24 pages, 8 figures. Corrected typos, added comment about counterterm. To appear in JHE

Weak coupling large-N transitions at finite baryon density

We study thermodynamics of free SU(N) gauge theory with a large number of colours and flavours on a three-sphere, in the presence of a baryon number chemical potential. Reducing the system to a holomorphic large-N matrix integral, paying specific attention to theories with scalar flavours (squarks), we identify novel third-order deconfining phase transitions as a function of the chemical potential. These transitions in the complex large-N saddle point configurations are interpreted as "melting" of baryons into (s)quarks. They are triggered by the exponentially large (~ exp(N)) degeneracy of light baryon-like states, which include ordinary baryons, adjoint-baryons and baryons made from different spherical harmonics of flavour fields on the three-sphere. The phase diagram of theories with scalar flavours terminates at a phase boundary where baryon number diverges, representing the onset of Bose condensation of squarks.Comment: 38 pages, 7 figure